Well, we've seen some interesting campaign logos so far, and the candidates are jumping into the race faster than I can write about them! There are now upwards of 20 major party candidates who are well-known enough to get some level of national media attention, and there are certainly more to come.
Let's get on with it.
We're starting off with a doozy today. This logo has already been the subject of some intense media scrutiny and ridicule, so I'll try to be kind.
So, we've got "Jeb!" in what looks like some tightly kerned Baskerville Bold. First, it's worth noting that Jeb Bush in large part has his ancestry to thank for his rise to fame as a politician, which I suppose makes it all the more interesting that he has left his surname off of the logo. However, given the track record of his brother and the overall Bush fatigue that has taken hold on the public, the omission might just be a good idea.
What's not a good idea is the comically large exclamation point. This logo reeks of a casual goofiness that would be better suited for a sitcom or a board game than a presidential campaign. Come on, Jeb!
I think that exclamation point grows every time I look at it. It's not helping that it apparently isn't vertically aligned with anything.
Moving on...
Bobby Jindal is the conservative governor of Louisiana and a bit of a long-shot to win the Republican nomination, and his logo is a bit of a disaster.
It won't speak effectively to his target audience, I'm afraid. The typeface is sleek, modern and progressive (my money's on Avenir Book), and comes off a bit timid and dainty. His stylized J was obviously inspired by Obama's O. I understand the Jindal team's desire to follow the roadmap of a proven successful brand, but the end result is one that just looks forced and amateurish. And it looks a bit like a candy cane.
Now we're talking. Here's a logo that is unique and interesting without making my eyes bleed. My only issue with it is... who's O'Malley? This logo could use just a little more context to ground it.
Here's what works though... it's a great modern-but-classic font (looks like Nexa Black or Galano Classic Black, but even heavier) with nice tight kerning, and the oblique treatment is a nice choice to convey excitement and forward motion. The typeface is bold and confident, and the logo's color palette is very Democratic but unique enough to set him apart from the competition.
The border with the corner cutout is unique and effective as well, conveying open dialog and excitement, without bashing your head with an exclamation point (Jeb!, take note!).
After Rick Santorum's failed 2012 nomination bid, the eagle returns!
In some ways, Rick Santorum's 2016 effort is an improvement. It no longer spells out "Rick Sant Rum", so that's a big plus. I'd say that the typography isn't bad. The generic sans-serif font is a little uninspired, but layout is interesting, and I like the inclusion of the bold and wide-tracked serif for the "For President" tag.
The color choice is certainly interesting. I can't decide if that is a pinkish red or a reddish pink, but either way, it's an odd choice for a presidential campaign.
Finally, while the eagle is a meaningful (if a bit unimaginative) symbol for inclusion in the logo, its execution misses the mark for me. The classic American bald eagle is magestic, pure and confident. Santorum's eagle just looks a little... ill-tempered.
That's all for now!
]]>In Volume 1 of this series, we tackled the campaigns of Hillary Clinton, Ted Cruz, Rand Paul and Marco Rubio and found some pretty odd choices in their branding and logo design. It's time to take a look at four more politicians who have recently declared their candidacy.
Here we go, in alphabetical order:
Ben Carson is a bit of a Washington DC outsider, so it makes sense that his logo is a bit on the unconventional side.
Ben's team has chosen "CarsonAmerica" which I find to be a bit awkward. What exactly are they trying to say here? Carson's America? Carson for America? Nope, just CarsonAmerica, apparently. I also find it odd that a marginal candidate with very little name recognition would decide against putting his full name on the logo.
They've chosen a confident geometric typeface that to my eyes is really close to Lulo Clean Bold, a font that certainly welcomes comparisons to Gotham, which was popularized by Obama in his 2012 campaign (change we can believe in!). Interesting choice for a conservative, but it doesn't bother me.
CARSON is presented in a drab tan color with a subtle gradient. I assume they're going for gold, but the treatment fails to deliver the necessary shine to evoke a metallic finish. It's not working for me. The blue in AMERICA is quite nice, and the slight bump in size given to the first A gives the logo some balance. They've gone a bit heavy-handed with the symbolism though—the A doesn't need both a draped flag and an eagle hiding in the negative space.
Carly Fiorina is a former business executive running for president as a Republican, and like Ben Carson, has little experience in politics.
Her team has gone first-name-only, which feels to me like a play to her femininity. Just "CARLY"... no need for a last name to obfuscate things (though I'd argue that, like Ben Carson, she's likely to burn herself here due to her lack of name recognition).
She's attempting to court the female vote in the font selection and type treatment as well. The team has selected a delicate weight of Gotham (Gotham Book), tracked out wide. The color choices of navy and red project act as a good counter-balance, projecting a seriousness that is lacking in the letterforms.
Overall there's little to dislike here, although I find the star in the A to be a bit forced and generic. I think she's doing a pretty good job of speaking to her target audience without alienating anyone else.
Mike Huckabee has been heavily involved in politics for years. He's a former governor of Arkansas who gained a fair amount of attention on the national stage in his failed bid for the Republican nomination in 2008. Since then, his visibility has been boosted through his time as a host and political analyst on Fox News.
So, the good news is that he's got the name recognition to make "HUCKABEE 2016" work. The bad news is nearly everything else.
His slogan is "From Hope to Higher Ground," which just happens to be the name of the autobiography he released in coordination with his 2008 campaign. His reuse of that slogan makes me think that he's learned very little since his failed bid, and that he's marketing his book as much as his candidacy. And for those of us who didn't know he was born in Hope, Arkansas (which included me as of one hour ago), the phrase really doesn't make a whole lot of sense.
His team has gone with a poorly-kerned generic sans-serif font (looks very much like Rleud Heavy to me) with tacked-on stars accompanied by some lines that would look more appropriate on a track shoe. Well I guess he IS running.
Next!
Oh dear.
For the record, I kinda like Bernie Sanders. He's like that goofy but opinionated uncle you have who always tells you exactly what's on his mind, and that's refreshing for a man in Bernie's position. He represents Vermont in the US Senate as an Independent, but generally caucuses with the Democrats. He's also one of the few national politicans who embraces the term "socialist" and is desperate to have his views (which are considered a bit radical by US standards) taken seriously.
Which leads us to his branding choices. The use of only the first name "Bernie" and the casual typeface seem to support that image of, well... that goofy but opinionated uncle of yours. I'd say the typeface actually does a pretty good job of representing his personality, but does a poor job of representing him as someone who should be taken seriously.
Also, I can't help but see a lego head with an Elvis hairdo in the negative space between the r and the n.
Finally, the star on the i and the tri-color toothpaste swoosh aren't helping things.
That's all for today. I'm looking forward to the next four candidates!
]]>Today I decided to share an easy technique I use in virtually every Laravel project I create—an alternate approach to creating dynamic sidebars.
Here's a common use case. Say you've got a blog. On every page of the blog (whether it's the homepage, a list of posts, a single post, etc...), you'd like to have a sidebar. And in that sidebar, you'd like a list of links to your most recently published posts.
Now, the DRY principle tells us to only code that sidebar once, even though it'll be on multiple pages, so, we'll call a partial view (or an include) for the sidebar. And, the SoC principle tells us to separate our view logic from our business logic.
So... where does the logic for retrieving your recently published posts go? Including the logic in the partial will be in violation of SoC, and including the logic in our controller actions will be in violation of DRY!
The Laravel approach for this use case is the utilization of view composers. View composers are a nifty method of attaching business logic to one or more views. Check out the official docs for more information, but here's the gist of how they work.
The quick and very dirty method is to call View::composer() with a closure, passing along your recent posts as a variable:
View::composer('post._sidebar', function($view){
$recentPosts = Post::published()->recent()->take(5)->get() ;
$view->with('recentPosts', $recentPosts) ;
}) ;
Now, whenever the post/_sidebar.blade.php partial is called, it'll have access to a variable called $recentPosts.
Where you put the above code is entirely up to you. There really isn't a good place for it out of the box. The Laravel way is a lot more verbose than the above code (but also much less dirty!)—the view composer call should be wrapped up in a service provider. Again, check out the offical docs to see how this works.
I'm not wild about view composers because the instantiation of that $recentPosts variable is just so far away from the controller actions! I like code that is as self-explanatory as possible. In the above example, glancing at your post controller and your sidebar view will give you no information about where $recentPosts is instantiated, and it will take quite a bit of digging to find that view composer.
In devising my own method of tackling this use case I harkened back to my days as a Symfony 1.x developer. Symfony had the concept of a component, which was like a mini controller action that would be called from within a view. Symfony 2 also has a handy method for calling a controller action from within a view—the render helper.
So let's add this feature to our Laravel 5 app.
The easiest way to do this would be creating a helper that we can call within our view. Let's create an app/Support directory and a new file called ViewHelpers.php inside it. Here we go:
/** app/Support/ViewHelpers.php **/
function include_action($controller, $action, $params = array())
{
if (is_callable(array($controller, $action))) {
$c = new $controller ;
return $c->$action($params) ;
}
}
Simple. Our include_action function accepts a controller class name, an action name that corresponds with the controller action we want to call, and an optional array of parameters.
Let's now make sure our ViewHelpers.php file is getting loaded by adding it to composer.json in the autoload section:
/** composer.json **/
"autoload": {
"classmap": [
"database"
],
"psr-4": {
"App\\": "app/"
},
"files": [
"app/Support/ViewHelpers.php"
]
},
Let's create our controller action to retrieve and display the recent posts. Notice we're prefixing the method name with an underscore to differentiate it from our normal controller actions.
/** app/Http/Controllers/PostController.php **/
namespace App\Http\Controllers;
class PostController extends Controller
{
/** ... */
public function _recentPosts($parameters = array())
{
extract($parameters) ;
$count = isset($count) ? $count : 10 ;
$posts = Post::published()->recent()->orderBy('published_at', 'desc')->take($count)->get() ;
return \View::make('post._recentPosts', ['posts'=>$posts]) ;
}
}
Now all we have to do is create our posts/_recentPosts.blade.php view to display the list of posts and call our new _recentPosts action from within our sidebar view:
<!-- resources/views/post/_sidebar.blade.php -->
<aside class="sidebar">
{!! include_action('App\Http\Controllers\PostController', '_recentPosts', ['count'=>5]) !!}
</aside>
That's all there is to it! This approach is compliant with both the DRY principle and the SoC principle, and the instantiation of our $recentPosts variable is in a very logical place.
]]>Here we go, in alphabetical order...
Hillary Clinton's logo is certainly garnering the most passionate response. Reception has been decidedly mixed, but everyone seems to have an opinion of it. Notice now nobody's talking about Ted Cruz's or Rand Paul's logos. The buzz that Hillary's logo has generated (even the negative buzz) is good news for her campaign.
We've got a boring blocky and blue H with a big red arrow. What's going on here? Why are people making such a fuss? The big reason is that Hillary's logo is a pretty huge departure from most campaign logos (for better or worse). It's unabashedly flat and minimalist. Hell, it doesn't even have her name on it! Even on her web site, you have to scroll down to the copy to see the first mention of her name.
This was a gamble and I think it's paying off. The more this logo pops up on social media and news sites, the more it begins to stand on its own. She doesn't need her name on it, we all know who she is.
We can complain all we want about the Chromostereopsis effect that the gaudy red-on-blue shapes have on our eyes. We can sit here and laugh about the lunacy of a Democrat using a red arrow pointing to the right. We can scoff at the logo's childlike simplicity and compare it to the universal Hospital sign. But none of the criticism matters if the country is talking about it and that damn H is burned into our retinas.
Okay, moving on...
Here's the good news. It's a pretty nice font (not sure what it is, but it's very similar to Electra Bold). It's a serif font, which supports his conservative ideals, but it has a bit of a modern edge to it. The medium gray is pretty bland but I don't hate it. Overall, the typography is pretty good.
The trouble lies with the symbol flanking the text. Some see the shape as a drop of water. Most (myself included) see a flame, which is more likely—after all, Cruz's campaign motto is "Reigniting the Promise of America." The question becomes... if the symbol is indeed supposed to be a flame, why on earth would you make it an upside-down American flag? Ted doesn't seem like the flag-burning type.
Overall it's a pleasant enough logo to look at—the colors and shapes are very nice. But I have to question the thought process of turning the American flag into a flame.
Next up is Rand Paul. Bold and oblique, and all uppercase. First name only. There's a good bit to like about this one. It certainly projects strength and confidence and he's applying a nifty use of negative space between the A and the N for the handle of the torch. I like that he isn't bothering with the last name. "Rand" is unique enough to stand on its own ("Stand with Rand!").
The font (dangerously close to Obama's Gotham) is decidedly not conservative, perhaps indicating that Rand is his own man. It'll be interesting to see how that plays out to the conservative base.
I think the biggest letdown of this logo is the flame. It could certainly use a little tweaking to make it more... fiery? I don't know—I keep seeing the hairdo of Philip J. Fry. Further, the torch is reminiscent of a paintbrush dipped in red, giving the logo more of an art supply feel to it than a presidential candidate.
Finally, we come to Marco Rubio. This, in my opinion, is the worst of the bunch. It's just pure lazy. All lowercase geometric sans-serif (looks to me like Avant Garde Demi with a taller ascender and bad kerning). Trying desperately to be modern and trendy, he'd be better positioned to open up a furniture store than a presidential campaign. This will not appeal to his conservative base.
Oh, and he chooses to dot the i with the shape of our great country? That's just treasonous. Have some respect, man!
]]>The first stop on my journey across the fifty states is Massachusetts, my home. I grew up in Philadelphia, but moved here to go to college and, like so many others before me, I enjoyed the area so much that I chose to stay after my studies were complete. I fell in love with autumn in New England, the rich history and culture, and of course the Red Sox. I suppose my decision to stay here wasn't too much of a surprise, given my lifelong tepid enthusiasm for the Philadelphia sports teams (though I've still got a soft spot in my heart for the Phillies).
So what gives Massachusetts its identity? Its liberal population? High property taxes? Baked beans? Michael Dukakis?
I think that the rich history of The Bay State contributes more to its identity than everything else. After all, this is the place to which pilgrims journeyed from England on the Mayflower in 1620. And when patriots in Massachusetts rebelled against the British in 1775, they became the catalyst for the American Revolutionary War. In fact, I'd argue that there is no state that has been more influential in the forming of the United States of America than Massachusetts.
How can we convey a sense of history in our sign? One great place to start is typography. One common motif you'll often see in Revolutionary War-era printed materials is heavy use of all caps in a serif font with wide spacing (or tracking) in between the letters.
Above I have collected a few meaningful colors for Massachusetts. First we've got a nice dark navy (Red Sox blue), a slightly lighter and more saturated blue (American flag blue), a scarlet red (American flag red) and a gold color that is used in the state seal.
I decided to base the design around the darker shade of blue for a couple of reasons. The fact that it is not quite so saturated gives it more of an antique feel to it. Also, it is probably a bit closer to the blue worn by the Patriots during the Revolutionary War. I considered integrating the red or gold as an accent color, but preferred the monochromatic aesthetic.
So, as far as I'm concerned there's really two options here, The Bay State and The Spirit of America. Yes, The Spirit of America was actually a tourism slogan from the 80s, but if it's good enough for Massachusetts' license plates, it's good enough for me!
I'd be remiss to ignore the ubiquitous town signs scattered throughout the state (pictured above). These signs are everywhere. The open-book profile has changed a bit over the years, but the shape is quintessential Massachusetts. Hooray for the pursuit of knowledge! I also like the incorporation of the establishment date.
Finally, I wanted to incorporate a subtle visual reference to the establishment of the United States, so I worked in the circular arrangement of stars representing the original 13 colonies from the "Betsy Ross" flag.
That was fun. Up next is my birthplace of Pennsylvania. Stay tuned!
]]>Today I begin a project of my own.
I'm a fairly avid traveller, and between road trips, day trips and visiting family in Philadelphia, I have crossed quite a few state lines. From point A to point B, I'm always taking note of the signs I see, and it's difficult to resist donning my graphic designer hat.
Though graphic design is always a balance of form and function, the vast majority of highway signs are designed from a completely utilitarian standpoint—big (but not too bold) sans-serif font with a tall x-height, and white type on green to maximize readability at all hours of the day and in all conditions. And rightly so. After all, it's more critical that we can discern from a momentary glance which exit is approaching than it is to get lost in the subtle elegance of the sign's visual appeal.
But there's one type of sign on the highways that could benefit from a greater attention paid to aesthetics—the welcome sign.
Welcome signs offer us a wonderul opportunity to get creative. Since at-a-glance legibility isn't as critically important as in most other road signs, we are able to better balance the scales of form and function.
Redesigning a state's welcome sign is also an excellent branding exercise. The sign should make a great first impression for first-time visitors and give them a sense of what the state is all about. The application of a thoughtful color palette and typeface alone can go a long way in conveying the state's identity.
I hope you join me over the coming weeks as I take a virtual journey across America, learning all about what makes each state unique and [hopefully] translating that identity into my designs.
First up? My home state of Massachusetts.
]]>Why build this? First off, one of the most interesting aspects of being a freelance developer is the critical importance of keeping up with the frequent technology changes that drive the web. As a result, we freelancers are constantly looking for simple projects to take on in order to learn a new framework, programming language or methodology. Such was the case when the version 5 of the PHP framework Laravel was released earlier this year.
And why a personal receipe manager?
Well, I love cooking, and I've long been searching for a simple clutter-free service for storing and viewing my recipes. Yes, the market for recipe management is a somewhat crowded one. However, most of the available offerings come with a price tag and are burdened with features I don't really need or want. Also, most of the players seem to offer either a desktop experience or a mobile app experience (not both!). At any rate, I felt there was an opportunity for a new web application that is simple, mobile-optimized, free of clutter and free of charge.
Anyway, feel free to check it out and let me know what you think. In the near future I'll be adding some new features, like recipe sharing, multiple print views, and importing recipes from some of your favorite online sources!
]]>